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Double Win Practice Policies

February 22, 2013

The MHSAA’s third health and safety thrust for the next four years focuses on practice rules, especially early in the fall season.

Here we will be especially interested in finding “double wins,” that is, policies that simultaneously enhance acclimatization and reduce head contact.

In football, for example, this could mean increasing the number of days without protective pads before the first practice in full pads.  Michigan requires three days, but there’s a trend toward four or five days in other states.

Football might also limit any day to a single practice in pads, following the lead of colleges and a growing number of state high school associations that are restricting two-a-day practices in pads on the same day or on consecutive days.

Both of these changes could make acclimatization more gradual and healthy, and reduce the occurrences for contact to the head:  two priorities as practice policies are reviewed and revised.

The MHSAA’s sport committees, sometimes with their work augmented by that of special task forces, are being charged with these responsibilities.

Current Events

November 3, 2017

This is the ninth year that I have been posting blogs twice a week – each Tuesday and Friday. A recent project required I go back through the postings of the eight previous years; and a sidebar of that project is this posting.

I rediscovered that in the fall of 2009, I was writing about topics that remain current today. For example,

  • August 18 – What new sports may be in the future of high school athletics?

  • August 25 – The prospects of 8-player football.

  • September 4 – Baseball pitching rules.

  • September 8 – Video streaming.

  • October 6 – Protection from head injuries.

  • November 17 – Foreign students.

  • November 20 – Football scheduling.

  • November 27 – Football Playoffs.

And on several occasions over the first six months, the topics were problems in school finance and the financial pressures on school sports, reasons for various eligibility rules, changes in playing rules to promote participant safety, tournament classification, and the need for stronger leadership on all levels of school sports.

All of these topics remain current. Proving once again, perhaps, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, that there are no genuinely new topics.